by Dan Simmons
A teenaged boy could really use this function to chase away unwanted erections, thought Harman. He realized that he really was a horny, dirty old man.
Not so old, really, thought Harman. The medical monitor had told him that he had the physical body of an average slightly out-of-shape thirty-one-year-old man.
Other functions floated onto his mental checklist: figure-ground enhancement, enhanced empathy, another that he thought of as the beserker function—a temporary spiking of adrenaline and all other physical and strength-multiplying abilities, probably to be used as a last resort in a fight or if one had to lift a ton or two off one’s child. Besides the already used and misused memory replay function, Harman saw that replay data inputted through someone else’s sharing function. There was a function that would allow him to put his body into a sort of hibernation, a temporary slowing of everything to the point of stasis. He realized that this wasn’t a quick way to catch a nap but designed to be used with something like the crystal coffin in the Taj Moira if one needed to remain alive but intert for long periods of time—in Moira’s case, very long periods of time—without suffering bedsores, muscle atrophy, morning breath, and the other side effects of normal human unconsciousness. Harman saw at once that the real Savi had used this function many times in her time crèche on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu and elsewhere to survive and thrive over the fourteen centuries of her hiding from the voynix and the post-humans.
There were many more functions—some of them intriguing beyond words—but the concentration necessary to explore them was bringing back Harman’s headache. He shut down that part of his brain for the night.
Immediately more powerful sensory information flowed in. The surge of waves far above. A photoluminescent-phytoplanktonish glow in the upper strata of the Atlantic that looked like an underwater aurora borealis to his tired eyes.
The sky over the ocean was also alive with light—not air-to-sea lightning this time but internal cloud lightning, silent explosions showing the fractal complexity of the churning clouds as lit from within. These pulses and explosions of light were silent—not the slightest hint of thunder reaching his little sleeping bag on the bottom of the Atlantic Breach—so Harman crossed his arms behind his head and just enjoyed the light show, also appreciating the effect of the cloud lightning on the still-churning surface of the ocean.
Patterns. Patterns everywhere. All of nature and the universe dancing at the edge of chaos, reprieved by fractal boundaries and a billion hidden algorithmic protocols hardwired into everything and every interaction, but beautiful nonetheless—oh, so beautiful. He realized that there was at least one function he hadn’t really explored that could sort out most of these patterns for him, far better than mere evolved human senses and sensibilities could, but it would probably be an interdicted function requiring ring-connections, and besides…Harman didn’t need a genetically enhanced function to appreciate the pure beauty of this silent mid-Atlantic show that was being put on just for him.
He lay on the floor of the Breach, hands behind his head, and said a prayer for Ada and his possible son or daughter. (Her functions, when activated, would tell her which it was.) He wished he could be with her now. He prayed to the God he’d never really thought about—to the Quiet God whom Setebos and his lackey Caliban feared above all else according to what the monster had blurted out on Prospero’s Isle—and he prayed only that his beloved Ada would remain well and alive and as happy as the terrible circumstances of these times and their separation across space would allow.
As he fell asleep, Harman heard the rasp and sawing of Moira’s snoring. He smiled as he drifted off. A thousand years of post-human nanocyte and DNA-rearranging cleverness hadn’t cured them from snoring. But, of course, it was Savi’s human body that…
Harman fell asleep in midthought.
71
Achilles wishes he was dead.
The air is so foul and thick here in Tartarus, his lungs burn so fiercely, his eyes are watering and hurting so much, his skin and guts feel like they are ready simultaneously to implode and explode from the pressure, the Oceanids monster-woman is carrying him so rib-shattering tightly in her thigh-fingered fist, and his outlook for the future is so fucking dim, that he wishes that he could just die and get it over with.
But the quantum Fates will not allow him this option. That bitch of a goddess mother of his, that tart Thetis who’d professed love to his father—the man whom he’d always honored as his father, Peleus—and then lain with Zeus like the aquatic roundheels she was, had held him in the Celestial Fire and created a quantum singularity point for his death—to be reached only through the actions of the now dead and cremated Paris of Ilium—and that, as they say, is that.
So he suffers and tries to focus on what is going on outside his tight, rapidly imploding sphere of pain and discomfort.
The three Titan-giant daughters of Okeanos—Asia, Panthea, and Ione—are striding quickly through the poisonous gloom toward a brighter glow that might be a volcanic eruption, Achilles held tight in Asia’s huge, sweaty fist. When Achilles is able to open his burning eyes and catch glimpses of the landscape through his tears—tears from toxic chemicals in the air, not from emotion—he gets blurry views of high, rocky ridges such as the one the three Oceanids are now striding along, thundering volcanoes, deep chasms filled with lava and oddly shaped monsters, an escort of the giant centipede-things that must be related to the Healer on Olympos, occasional glimpses of silhouettes that must be other Titans crashing and bellowing through the gloom, and a sky filled with orange-limned clouds, wild lightning, and other electrical displays.
Suddenly the giantess Titan named Panthea speaks—“Is that the véiled form we seek who sits on that ebony throne?”
Asia, bitch-voice booming like boulders crashing down a rocky slope. (Achilles has not the strength to cover his aching ears with his acid-scalded hands.)—“It is. The veil has fallen.”
Panthea—“I see a mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom dart round, as light from the meridian sun.—But the Demogorgon itself remains ungazed upon and shapeless, neither limb, nor form, nor outline; yet we all three feel it is a living Spirit.”
The Demogorgon speaks then and Achilles buries his face in Asia’s huge, rough palm in a vain effort to muffle the subsonic pain of that allencroaching voice. “ASK WHAT THOU WOULDST KNOW, OCEANIDS.”
Asia offers up her palm with the writhing Achilles on it. “Canst thou tell us what shape and manner of thing this is we have caught? It seems more starfish than man, and it writhes and squeaks as such.”
The Demogorgon roars again. “IT IS ONLY A MORTAL MAN, ALTHOUGH MADE IMMORTAL BY THE CELESTIAL FIRE’S MISTAKE. IT IS NAMED ACHILLES AND IT IS VERY FAR FROM HOME. NO MORTAL HAS EVER COME TO TARTARUS BEFORE THIS DAY.”
“Ah,” says Asia, seeming to lose interest in her toy and roughly setting Achilles down on a burning-hot boulder.
Achilles feels the heat all around and when he opens his eyes, he can see farther because of the glow of lava and eruption, but is horrified to see that lava flowing past on both sides of his steaming boulder. When he looks up toward the Demogorgon on its throne—the throne a mountain taller than the erupting volcanoes, and the hooded and veiled non-shape on that throne seeming to rise up for miles and miles—the shapelessness of the Demogorgon makes him want to vomit. So he does. None of the Oceanics seems to notice his retching.
Asia asks the huge form, “What else canst thou tell?”
“ALL THINGS THOU DAR’ST DEMAND.”
“Who made the living world?” asks Asia. Achilles has already decided that she is the most talkative, if not the most intelligent, of the three idiot Oceanids.
“GOD.”
“Who made all that it contains?” persists Asia. “Thought? Passion? Reason? Will? Imagination?”
“GOD. ALMIGHTY GOD.”
Achilles decides that this Demogorgon is a spirit-thing of few words. And fewer thoughts in its head, if it has a
head. He would give anything if he could rise and pull his sword from his belt, unsling his shield from his back. First he would kill the Demogorgon and then the three Titan sisters…slowly.
“Who made that sense, which, when the winds of Spring in rarest visitation, or the voice of one beloved heard in youth alone,” asks Asia in her crackly, booming voice, “fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim the radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, and leaves the peopled world a solitude when it returns no more?”
Achilles throws up again. This time it is as an aesthetic statement more than a reaction to optical vertigo. He decides that he will kill the Oceanids first after all. He would like to kill this Asia bitch several times over. He visualizes hollowing out her skull and using it for a house, her eye sockets as round windows.
“MERCIFUL GOD,” intones the Demogorgon.
There is no Greek word for “ditto,” but Achilles thinks that the Demogorgon should coin one. It does not surprise the Achaean in the least that Oceanids and the formless spirit in the murk down here in Tartarus speak his form of Greek to one another. They’re strange creatures, monsters really, but even monsters in Achilles’ experience speak Greek. They’re not barbarians, after all.
“And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,” continues Asia, her voice as relentless as the babble of a two-year-old who’s just learned how to keep a conversation going with an adult by asking “Why?” a hundred times over. “Which from the links of the great chain of things, to every thought within the mind of man sway and drag heavily, and each one reels under the load toward the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate, and self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood. Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day; and…”
She breaks off.
Achilles hopes that it is some Tartarusian cataclysm that will end their world and swallow up Asia and her two sisters screaming like honey-covered appetizers at a Myrmidon feast, but when he forces his eyes open he sees that it is only a circle of bright light opening, pouring white brilliance into the red gloom.
A Brane Hole.
Something far from human is silhouetted against the light of that hole. It’s shaped roughly like a man, but it is made up of metallic spheres—not only a sphere where the head should be, but spheres for the torso, spheres for the outflung arms, spheres for the staggering legs. Only the feet and hands—wrapped in some lighter-than-bronze metal—look even vaguely manlike.
The thing comes closer and two brilliant lights stab out from the smaller spheres that are its shoulders. A red light, thin as a javelin, leaps from its right hand and plays across the Oceanid Sisters, making their flesh sizzle and pop. The Titanesses stagger backward, wading through lava, evidently unharmed by the red beam but shielding their faces and eyes from the painful white light flowing out of the Brane Hole.
“Goddammit, Achilles, are you just going to lie there?”
It’s Hephaestus. Achilles now sees the iron-sphere bubbles as some sort of protective suit, with iron-shod feet and heavily gauntleted hands emerging from the chain of globes. There is some sort of steaming, burping breathing pack on the back and the top bubble is clear as glass; Achilles can now make out the dwarf-god’s ugly, bearded face in the reflected light from his shoulder searchlights and handheld laser.
Achilles manages a weak squeak.
Hephaestus laughs, the ugly noise amplified by the speakers in his pressure suit. “Don’t like the air and gravity here, eh? All right. Get into this. It’s called a thermskin and it’ll help you breathe.” The god of fire and artifice throws down some impossibly thin garment onto the boulder next to Achilles.
The hero tries to stir, but the air weakens and burns him. All he can do is wiggle and cough and retch.
“Oh, fuck me,” says the crippled god. “I guess I’ll have to dress you like an infant. I was afraid of this. Lie still, quit squirming. Don’t shit on me or puke on me while I’m undressing you and tucking you into this thing.”
Ten minutes later—with a tapestry of Hephaestus’ curses now hanging in the air like glowing smoke from the volcanoes—Achilles is upright on solid rock next to Hephaestus, dressed in a gold thermskin under his armor, breathing easily through the thermskin cowl’s clear membrane—the dwarf-god had called it an osmosis mask—brandishing his acid-etched shield and still-bright sword, staring up at the looming but still indistinct mass called the Demogorgon, and feeling invulnerable again and not a little pissed off. Achilles only hopes that the Oceanid named Asia will start asking one of her endless questions again so he will have an excuse to gut her like a fish.
“Demogorgon,” calls Hephaestus, using the amplifier built into his fishbowl helmet, “we have met once before, more than nineteen hundred years ago during the Olympians’ War with the Giants. I am called Hephaestus…”
“THOU ART THE CRIPPLED ONE,” booms Demogorgon.
“Yes. How nice of you to remember. Achilles and I have come to Tartarus to seek out you and the Titans—Kronos, Rhea, all of the Old Ones—and to ask for your help.”
“DEMOGORGON DOES NOT HELP MERE GODS AND MORTALS.”
“No, of course not,” says Hephaestus, his rasping voice amplified a hundred times by the speakers in his suit. “Shit. Achilles, do you want to take over? Talking to this thing is like talking to your own ass.”
“Can that big mass of nothing hear me?” Achilles asks the little god.
“I HEAR YOU.”
Achilles stares skyward, focusing on the roiling red clouds a little to the side of the featureless, veiled nonface of the nonthing looming above him. “When you say ’God,’ Demogorgon, do you mean Zeus?”
“WHEN I SAY GOD, I MEAN GOD.”
“You must mean Zeus then, for right now the son of Kronos and Rhea is calling all the surviving gods together on Olympos and is announcing that he—Zeus—is the God of Gods, the Lord of All Creation, the God of This and All Universes.”
“THEN EITHER HE LIETH OR YOU DO, SON OF MAN. GOD REIGNS. BUT NOT ON OLYMPOS.”
“Then Zeus has enslaved all other gods and mortals,” says Achilles, his thermskin-speaker voice and radio broadcast echoing from the volcano’s slopes and cinder ridges.
“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL: THOU KNOWEST IF ZEUS BE SUCH OR NOT.”
“I do know,” says Achilles. “Zeus is a greedy immortal son of a bitch—no offense to Rhea if she’s out there in the shadows somewhere listening. I think he’s a coward and a bully. But if you consider him God, then he will reign on Olympos and in the universe forever and forever.”
“I SPOKE BUT AS YE SPEAK, FOR ZEUS IS THE SUPREME OF ALL LIVING THINGS.”
“Who is the master of the slave?” asks Achilles.
“Oh, that’s good,” whisper-hisses Hephaestus. “That’s very good…”
“Shut up,” says Achilles.
The Demogorgon rumbles. It is so loud that at first Achilles thinks the nearest volcano is in full eruption. Then the rumble modulates itself into words.
“IF THE ABYSM COULD VOMIT FORTH ITS SECRETS—BUT A VOICE IS WANTING, THE DEEP TRUTH IS IMAGELESS; FOR WHAT WOULD IT AVAIL TO BID THEE GAZE ON THE REVOLVING WORLD? WHAT TO BID SPEAK ON FATE, TIME, OCCASION, CHANCE, AND CHANGE? TO THESE ALL THINGS ARE SUBJECT BUT ETERNAL LOVE AND THE PERFECTION OF THE QUIET.”
“Whatever you say,” says Achilles. “But as we speak, Zeus is proclaiming himself Lord of All Creation and soon he will demand that all of that creation—not just his little world at the base of Mount Olympos—pay homage to him and him alone. Goodbye, Demogorgon.”
Achilles turns to leave, grabbing the sputtering god of artifice by his metal-bubble arm and pulling him around, away from the unformed mass looming above them.
“HALT!…ACHILLES, FALSE SON OF PELEUS, TRUE SON OF ZEUS, WOULD-BE AUTHOR OF DEICIDE AND PATRICIDE. WAIT.”
Achilles stops, turns back, and waits with Hephaestus. The Oceanids are cowering, covering their heads as if from hot ashfall.
With a sound that makes all the other unbearable sounds seem small, the rocks around Demogorgon’s throne cleave in the purple night, the lava glow grows deeper and broader, a rainbow of impossible colors arches through Tartarus’ gloom, and chariots the size of mountains appear from nowhere, drawn by gigantic steeds that are not horses—nothing like horses, not even remotely like horses—some being whipped on by wild-eyed charioteers that are not men or gods, other steeds staring behind them with burning eyes filled with fear. The charioteers themselves are almost impossible for mortal eyes to look upon, so Achilles averts his gaze. He thinks that it would be unwise to vomit again while sealed behind this thermskin facemask.
“THESE ARE THE IMMORTAL HOURS WHICH THOU DIDST DEMAND HEAR THY CASE,” booms the Demogorgon. “THEY SHALL BRING KRONOS AND HIS ILK HERE TO THIS PLACE.”
The air implodes with a series of sonic booms, the Oceanids scream in fright, and the huge chariots disappear in circles of flame.
“Well…” says Hephaestus over the suit radio and does not go on.
“Now we wait,” says Achilles, setting his sword in his belt and slinging his shield.
“Not for long,” says Hephaestus.
The air is filling with circles of fire again. The giant chariots are returning by the hundreds—no, by the thousands—each one filled with a giant form, some human-looking, many not.
“BEHOLD!” says the Demogorgon.
“It’s hard not to,” says Achilles. He braces himself and slides his great and beautiful shield across his forearm.